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SAN ANTONIO, Texas – A group of plaintiffs is asking a federal court to force Texas to redraw the state’s current congressional district boundaries ahead of the November 2018 elections.

The three-judge panel ruled March 10 that Republicans had drawn three of the state’s congressional districts with the intent to discriminate against Latino and African-American voters.

Matt Angle, director of the Lone Star Project, a political research group, says the districts identified by the court were “torturously gerrymandered” to exclude minority voters, a process he calls “packing and cracking.”

“Republican leaders drew the maps in which they packed as many of those neighborhoods into as few districts as possible and then they cracked the rest of those neighborhoods into as many districts as possible in order to undermine their voting strength,” he states.

In its ruling, the court did not discuss any remedies to correct the problems. The plaintiffs’ motion seeks to order the Legislature to redraw the state’s current districts in time for the 2018 midterm elections.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton maintains that because the ruling pertains only to the 2011 districts, the court has no jurisdiction to order changes in the current boundaries, which went into effect in 2013.

However, Angle says the plaintiffs’ motion points out that when the Legislature redrew the districts in 2013, the three areas the court identified from 2011 were not substantially altered.

“Those districts are absolutely unchanged in the current map relative to the old map, and so you would think that the court would want to change those before we have another election,” he stresses.

The judges found that the three voided districts were drawn to minimize the impact of minority voters, particularly in Austin and San Antonio. He said one district, the 23rd, sprawls 500 miles from San Antonio to near El Paso, an area larger than many states.

“Current Republican leaders see the method for retaining their power long-term to intentionally discriminate against African-American and Latino voters, and the court has stepped in here to call them on the violations,” Angle maintains.

Plaintiffs in the case include the NAACP, Mexican American Legislative Caucus, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Texas Latino Redistricting Task Force and several African-American and Latino members of Congress.

The Texas Tribune March 13, 2017NewsComments Off on Texas Lost a Ruling Over its Congressional Map. So What’s Next for the State?

A three-judge federal panel’s recent ruling on Texas’ electoral maps could shake up state politics and carry national implications.

The ruling may initially sound simple enough. Texas intentionally discriminated against black and Latino voters in drawing its 2011 congressional map, the majority found in a 2-1 ruling Friday night. More specifically: Three of the state’s 36 districts violate either the U.S. Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.

But little is straightforward about redistricting, the once-a-decade process of rejiggering political boundaries to address the changing population. Friday’s ruling was no exception, simultaneously answering questions and raising new ones.

“It’s a gigantic ruling, but it leaves a lot of uncertainty,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “It makes your head hurt.”

Here’s what you need to know about the San Antonio-based panel’s ruling and what’s next.

Mapdrawers “acted with an impermissible intent to dilute minority voting strength” in some districts, the majority ruled. This included “packing” and “cracking” minority populations in certain districts to reduce their influence across the larger electoral map.

Texas did not dispute that it practiced “extreme gerrymandering.” The state’s lawyers, however, said only partisanship, not racism, motivated lawmakers to pack and crack Democrats.

But in Texas and elsewhere, race and partisanship are often intertwined, and opponents of the maps successfully argued — in a few cases, at least — that the Republican-dominated Legislature advanced the party’s interests by looking to race.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) was among several groups that cheered the ruling as a sweeping victory for minorities seeking to bolster their voices in politics.

“The ruling will help protect Latinos from manipulation of district lines in order to reduce their political clout,” said Nina Perales, who is representing MALDEF in the lawsuit.

So will the Legislature redraw the congressional map? And if so, when?

Here’s where it gets tricky. Friday’s order made it clear that the 2011 map cannot stand, but it did not order anyone to immediately redraw it. That might be because that map wasn’t actually in effect.

Amid the legal wrangling, Texas has conducted elections with a court-approved interim map. Li, the redistricting expert, said the court must still rule on that map, drawn in 2013. It’s not clear when that will happen. Striking down the 2013 map is something of a formality, Li said, because the boundaries of two of its districts — Farenthold’s 27th and Doggett’s 35th — are identical to those drawn in 2011.

It’s anybody’s guess when Texas will get new maps — or even who will draw them. Generally, courts will give lawmakers another crack at drawing a map that’s been struck down. But plaintiffs could argue that Texas can’t be trusted to try again, pushing instead for an alternative fix.

Can Texas appeal Friday’s ruling?

Sure. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton could ask the U.S Supreme Court to weigh in on the case. But it’s not clear when or whether the Republican will do that — largely because of how open-ended the ruling is.

“Since this is an interim order that does not propose any relief, the State is evaluating its options, which may be impacted by any future court rulings,” Kayleigh Lovvorn, a Paxton spokeswoman, told the Texas Tribune on Monday.

What about Texas’ state House and Senate maps?

The courts have settled squabbles over the state Senate map, but a challenge to the House boundaries is still pending. It’s not clear when the judges will rule.

What are the larger implications of Friday’s ruling?

Experts call it huge that the judges found “intentional” discrimination in the congressional map — a condition that could ultimately put Texas back on the list of states that need permission to change their election laws.

A 2013 Supreme Court ruling — Shelby County v. Holder — sprung Texas and other states with a history of discrimination from that list. But Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act includes a “bail-in” provision allowing courts to put a state back under supervision (a process called “preclearance”) if it is found to have knowingly discriminated in changing its election laws.

“This is a big test of whether the Voting Rights Act still has some teeth,” Li said.

Before the Shelby County ruling, Texas needed the U.S. Department of Justice’s signoff to change its election laws. If courts again ordered such supervision, Texas could find a sympathetic ear from the current U.S. attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who applauded the Shelby County decision in 2013.

But if the judges give Texas a supervisor, they could choose someone other than the Justice Department — another court, for instance.

“The court has broad discretion in defining how preclearance will work,” Li said. “Section 3 [of the Voting Rights Act] is very untested, and this case will help define what a court can and cannot do.”

The redistricting case is one of two that could trigger preclearance. A federal judge in Corpus Christi heard arguments last month over whether Texas purposefully discriminated in crafting its 2011 voter identification law.

In a unanimous decision released in April 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to uphold Texas’ current system for drawing legislative districts so that they are roughly equal in population.

The U.S. Department of Justice has ditched its longstanding position that Texas lawmakers purposefully discriminated against minority voters by passing the nation’s strictest voter identification law in 2011.

The 166-page ruling by the San Antonio-based district judges was the latest in a complicated case that dates back to 2011, and comes just two election cycles away from the next U.S. Census — when the state would draw a new map under normal circumstances.

In 2013, the district court found evidence that lawmakers intentionally discriminated when redrawing the boundaries. But the U.S. Supreme Court soon complicated the case when it struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act that had forced Texas to seek permission before making changes to election procedures.

But that didn’t end the legal battle. The U.S. Department of Justice and other plaintiffs pressed on in the case, and Texas held elections using interim maps drawn by judges.

In its decision Friday, the court still found that “mapdrawers acted with an impermissible intent to dilute minority voting strength or otherwise violated the Fourteenth Amendment” of the Constitution.

“The Court finds that this evidence persuasively demonstrates that mapdrawers intentionally packed [concentrated certain populations] and cracked [diluted certain populations] on the basis of race (using race as a proxy for voting behavior) with the intent to dilute minority voting strength,” U.S. District Judges Orlando Garcia and Xavier Rodriguez wrote in the majority opinion.

In his dissenting opinion, Judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals called the case moot under previous rulings, and he sharply criticized the Justice Department.

“The Department of Justice has overplayed its hand and, in the process, has lost credibility,” Smith wrote. “The wound is self-inflicted. The grand theory on which its intervention was mainly based—that invidious racial motives infect and predominate in the drawing of the 2011 district lines—has crashed and burned. I respectfully dissent from the refusal to dismiss for want of jurisdiction.”

“Tonight is a victory for the voting rights of all Texans,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the state party chair, said in a statement.

Read more of our related coverage:

In a unanimous decision released in April 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to uphold Texas’ current system for drawing legislative districts so that they are roughly equal in population.

Some people think it’s unfair to have more eligible voters in one legislative district than in another. But the number of eligible voters in each district is far from the only difference that might matter to voters, Ross Ramsey wrote.